urban bicycle journeys

Where to go on an overcast Sunday morning?

I have cycled the Rocky Mount / Wilson area many times but I keep coming back. The two cities are twenty-two miles apart, each about fifty to sixty miles east of Raleigh, about eighty miles from my home in Chapel Hill. Their location is in an area called Down East. It would also tend to strike most North Carolinians I know as being Out There. They are certainly NOT the university boomtowns that are Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill. Both Rocky Mount NC (population 54,000) and Wilson NC (population 48,000) are small cities built mostly from tobacco money. Their boom period was from about 1890 to 1970. In both cases, their big industry was not cigarette production but the processing and marketing of bulk leaf tobacco. Both cities, especially Rocky Mount, also have or have had a variety of other assembly line manufacturing industries. Both sit on the north / south I-95 and the CSX rail line New York to Florida. Wilson and Rocky Mount have downtowns that looked completely vacant ten years ago but are slowing climbing back.

The wind on this Sunday was predicted to be blowing from the south. I decided to drive from my home in Chapel Hill to the south side of Wilson, park the car, then bicycle northward towards Rocky Mount with the wind at my back. I could hope the wind would change on the return ride.

I arrived in the Wilson area in our Ford Escape Hybrid on a Sunday morning, my Bike Friday in the back.

Where to park? I knew the poor part of Wilson was on the south side. I wasn’t really nervous about cycling through there but I wanted my car to be safe and did not know where to park. Just a few blocks after exiting US-301 I came upon something labeled USDA Service Center with a Wilson Botanical Garden in the back. Government property! It should be safe to park here on a Sunday, right?

I had parked about two miles south of downtown Wilson. I cycled north through a depressed neighborhood. Old tobacco warehouses were common. The streets were mostly vacant of car traffic.

As I cycled along I thought about two aspects of the poverty I was passing through. The first idea is that the while White individuals continue to proclaim their lack of racism, and I mostly believe them. Still, the collective racism in the real estate market continues to poke its head through. Redlining by banks was a big deal sixty years ago but we should have moved on from that. Most people and investors still do not want to live or build in majority Black neighborhoods.

My other thought is that many or most of the inhabitants of the Rocky Mount/Wilson area do not see this part of town either. For over fifty years the real economic action in both towns has been out on the big highway. For a bicyclist it is much safer to cycle on older street grids. Both these towns have their decaying-but-coming-back inner cities but in both cities a mile or two away are the Walmarts, the Targets, the now-declining shopping malls, surrounded by newer and more prosperous cul-de-sac residential neighborhoods. I avoid these newer neighborhoods because they lack the street grid that makes urban bicycling pleasant. When I am bicycling on older street grids am I seeing the “real” America? Maybe it should be called the “left-behind-but-coming-back” part of America.

Downtowns all over America have been vacant of most shopping for more than fifty years. With internet commerce making storefronts even more useless we have to realize that downtown department stores are never coming back. Ten years ago when I cycled downtown Wilson, buildings looked completely abandoned. Today most storefronts are vacant but there are signs of life. There is a brewery! A coffee shop! Much of it surrounds the relatively new downtown Whirligig Park that highlights the work of the late folk artist Vollis Simpson.

The courthouse

Despite the empty commercial buildings it is a huge sign of life is that new apartments are being built in downtown Wilson.

Near downtown older neighborhoods looked less thriving.

I started cycling on back roads for the twenty-one mile long bike road north toward Rocky Mount NC. Only a mile north of downtown Wilson is the 1,200 student Barton College. Its Hines Hall strikes me as a lovely building. It stopped and took photos from both sides.

Heading north, Google Maps had provided a route that put me “out in the country” more quickly than I anticipated. The ride to Rocky Mount NC only took about an hour and a half. Eastern North Carolina (“Down East”) is almost completely flat coastal plain.

I approached Rocky Mount from the south.

I cycled through the poorer south side of Rocky Mount towards downtown. There were lots of abandoned buildings, but someone seems to mow the yards.

I rolled into downtown. Downtown Rocky Mount looks abandoned. Only someone like me would notice that it looks better than it did five or ten years ago. The CSX main line runs right through the middle. Freight trains are a constant.

It was about 1:00 PM on a Sunday and I wanted lunch. (I had been fantasizing about lunch all morning.) I doubt anywhere else downtown was open but Larema Coffee House was bustling, surrounded by otherwise semi-abandoned buildings.

The crowd here was diverse at noontime on a Sunday! One group of seven or eight featured women wearing conspicuously long dresses, leading me to assume they are some kind of culturally conservative Christians. Two fancily dressed middle aged Black women sat on an upper level, looking like they were there for a meeting. Of course there were young people and their computers. At Larema Coffee, like similar independent coffee houses I have visited, they serve real food, made from actual bread and eggs in their shells. They will prepare for you, by hand, any kind of sandwich you want. I got ham and egg on croissant, with lettuce and tomato. The croissant was not super fresh, but certainly OK. Of course Starbucks offers food, but everything at Starbucks is premade and microwaveable.

These independent coffee houses are popping up all over America, especially in otherwise empty downtowns. Rocky Mount has traditionally featured its Eastern North Carolina chopped pork barbecue, part of a substantial Down East food culture. I propose that because of the internet, food trends today, like inner city coffee houses, are spreading as micro cultures all over America and less by physical proximity. Two miles away from here in Rocky Mount, out on the big highway in some chain restaurant, it likely seems like a different planet.

I got a large oat milk latte, two packs of sugar, which they unfortunately did not add as I requested. It was served in a tall pottery cup. The fact that the cup was chipped on the lip did not bother me too much. (I feel guilty almost every day throwing away a plastic cup lid. The coffee does stay hot longer in paper.)

There was not much to do but turn around and ride back to Wilson. I had wanted to make this bike ride a loop, returning a different way. I do love looking at airports and train stations. Cycling back I had thought about passing by the Rocky Mount Wilson Regional Airport, which had commercial flights until 2001, but the highways looked much busier, Bicycle safety is becoming more important to me. I had just cycled all the way from Wilson on two lane roads that lacked shoulders, yet almost nowhere had there been significant car traffic. I chose to cycle back in peace, on the same gentle roads that had brought me here.

I cycled back through the older and poorer southern part of Rocky Mount.

Much of the residential building does seem built during Rocky Mount’s boom period of the early 1900’s.

I cycled back out into the countryside.

This seems like it would have been a 1920’s gas station.

Out here in the country there are abandoned buildings as well.

It took a little less than two hours to cycle back in downtown Wilson, then on to the car parked on the south side. It was still there, intact. I drove home in time to make dinner for Tootie and me.